The transfer of the balance of population and wealth from the south and east to the north and Midlands made Parliamentary reform necessary."[76] With this transfer of the balance of economic power came a good deal of rivalry between the manufacturers and the landed gentry, the latter becoming more and more Tory, the former more and more Radical.

As all political power, in the main, was in the landowner's hands, men anxious to take part in politics eagerly bought up the small estates, and the old yeoman class disappeared, except in out-of-the-way places.

These yeomen and small landowners had been the backbone of the Parliamentary Party in the days of the Stuarts, but they were left hopelessly behind in an age of mechanical inventions and agrarian changes, and were in most cases glad to sell out and invest their property in other ways.
The story of the misery of rural depopulation in the first half of the sixteenth century repeats itself at the close of the eighteenth.
"A single farmer held as one farm the lands that once formed fourteen farms, bringing up respectably fourteen families.

The capitalist farmer came in like the capitalist employer.

His gangs of poor and ignorant labourers were the counterpart of the swarm of factory hands.